Whew, back to school already. My
Christmas vacation was way too short and after an almost nine hour school day,
I am completely exhausted. I had to get started on an order for a first
birthday party today despite the fact that I was feeling quite fatigued. I
whipped up some sugar cookie dough in my KithenAid for the first time today. My
life has actually changed. I used to do everything by hand, including creaming
the butter and sugar together and this part alone would normally take me about
fifteen minutes to do. With my KitchenAid though the whole dough making process
only took me ten minutes.
As the dough was chilling, I
began working on my star wand meringues. You’re probably wondering what the
heck that is so I will explain. The party is a princess theme so I piped some swirled
pink and white meringue into the shape of stars. After I had piped all of the
stars I inserted some lollipop sticks. For the longest time I was a little bit
apprehensive about using lollipop sticks in the oven as I had this
misconception that they would burst into flames. That of course is not true as
paper only begins to burn at around the 400 degree range. I ran out of the
lollipop sticks and used some bamboo skewers which I also use in my sugar
cookie pops. They work fine but the only downfall is that there is a pointy end
of the stick so what I have recently started doing is melting white chocolate
and putting a dab of it on the end of each stick. I could essentially do this
with the icing glaze I use for my sugar cookies, but the white chocolate dries
so much faster (less than 5 minutes)!
Some of the meringue wands so far...for some reason the pink ones look orange. Oh well!
After hours of baking and
switching pans, I still am not done my meringue wands, but I am positive I will
finish before they are due. I can’t wait to move into a place where I can have
a larger oven that can fit multiple pans. I have contemplated getting a
convection oven, but my experiences with convection ovens have not been all
that positive. In one incident, my pure white meringues got a dose of burnt ash
all over them! Now I realize that that was probably due to the fact that the
oven wasn’t totally clean, but the fan in the oven caused the ash to spray all
around and ruin my meringues. Not good at all! Perhaps I will give convection
ovens another try some time though as I guess I have not given them a fair
chance. Although I will have to adjust my recipes and oven temperatures, it
might be worth it so that I can bake more than one pan at a time. For some
reason, when I first opened up SD Bake Shoppe efficiency didn’t seem to concern
me all that much, but as business has picked up, the importance of increasing
efficiency is becoming more and more important to me.
What kind of ovens do you guys
use? Gas? Electric? Convection? Let me know how your ovens have been treating
you!
Beautiful
Baking Fellow Sweetie
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